McSweeney's and Believer Books are proud to announce the release of the book, Read Hard. This volume collects the finest essays and articles from the four-time National Magazine Award-nominated Believer magazine. The book combines all the erudition and wit readers have come to expect from its pages: Jonathan Lethem on Nathanael West, William T. Vollmann on W. G. Sebald, Ben Ehrenreich on Brian Evenson, Paul La Farge on Dungeons & Dragons, and much, much more. Below is an excerpt for your enjoyment.
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"LIKE CORMAC MCCARTHY,
BUT FUNNY":
AN EXCERPT FROM READ HARD.
BY ED PARK
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Charles Portis, author of True Grit, got John Wayne his only Oscar. He once had Karl Marx's old gig (as the London bureau chief for The New York Herald-Tribune). He's written four other novels, three of them masterpieces, though which three is up for debate. Here's 1,900 words [from a 7,000 word essay] about a guy you've never heard of. But should, we say.
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I. Among the Journalist Ants
In 1964, in the midst of so-called Swinging London, Charles McColl Portis had Karl Marx's old job. Portis (who turns seventy this year) was thirty at the time, not yet a novelist, just a newspaperman seemingly blessed by that guild's gods. His situational Marxism would have been hard to predict. Delivered into this world by the "ominous Dr. Slaughter" in El Dorado, Arkansas, in 1933, Charles Portis − sometimes "Charlie" or "Buddy" − had grown up in towns along the Arkla border, enlisted in the Marines after high school, and fought in the Korean War. Upon his discharge in 1955, he majored in journalism at the University of Arkansas (imagining it might be "fun and not very hard, something like barber college"), and after graduation worked at the appealingly named Memphis Commercial Appeal. He soon returned to his native state, writing for the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock.
He left for New York in 1960, and became a general-assignment reporter at the now-defunct New York Herald-Tribune, working out of what has to be one of the more formidable newsroom incubators in history − his comrades included Tom Wolfe (who would later dub him the "original laconic cutup") and future Harper's editor Lewis Lapham. Norwood's titular ex-Marine, after a fruitless few days in Gotham, saw it as "the hateful town," and Portis himself had once suggested (in response to an aspersion against Arkansas in the pages of Time) that Manhattan be buried in turnip greens; still, he stayed for three years. He apparently thrived, for he was tapped as the Trib's London bureau chief and reporter − the latter post held in the 1850s by the author of The Communist Manifesto (1848). (More specifically, his predecessor had been a London correspondent for the pre-merger New York Herald.) Recently, in a rare interview for the Arkansas Gazette Project at the University of Arkansas, Portis recalls telling his boss that the paper "might have saved us all a lot of grief if it had only paid Marx a little better."
Indeed, as Portis notes in his second novel, the best-selling True Grit (1968), "You will sometimes let money interfere with your notions of what is right." If Marx had decided to loosen up, Portis wouldn't have gone to Korea, to serve in that first war waged over communism, and (in the relentless logic of these things) wouldn't have put together his first protagonist, taciturn Korea vet Norwood Pratt, in quite the same way. Perhaps the well would have run dry − fast. Instead of writing five remarkable, deeply entertaining novels (three of them surely masterpieces, though which three is up for debate), Portis could be in England still, grinding out copy by the column inch, saying "cheers" when replacing the phone.
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In any event, Portis left not only England but ink-stained wretchdom itself − "quit cold," as Wolfe writes in "The Birth of the New Journalism: An Eyewitness Report" (1972), later the introduction to the 1973 anthology The New Journalism. After sailing back to the States on "one of the Mauretania's last runs," he reportedly holed up in his version of Proust's cork-lined study − a fishing shack back in Arkansas − to try his hand at fiction.
These journalists work pretty fast, and the slim picaresque Norwood appeared in 1966, to favorable notice. Portis's signature drollery and itinerant protagonist (Norwood Pratt, auto mechanic and aspiring country singer, ranges from Ralph, Texas, to New York City and back, initially to recover seventy dollars loaned to a service buddy) are already in place. The supporting cast includes a midget, a loaf-groping bread deliveryman, and a sapient chicken, and a looser hand might have plunged the tale into mere chaos or grotesquerie. But Portis's sense of proportion is flawless, and the resulting panorama, clocking in at under two hundred pages, stays snapshot-sharp throughout − a road novel as indispensible as On the Road itself.
With reportorial precision, and without condescension, Norwood captures all manner of reflex babble, the extravagant grammar of commercial appeal − stray words bathed in the exhaust of a Trailways bus. This omnivorous little book has a high metabolism, digesting everything from homemade store signs (i do not loan tools) and military-base graffiti to actuarial come-ons and mail-order ads for discount diamonds. Appropriately enough, the characters are constantly chowing down. On one leg of the journey, Edmund B. Ratner (formerly the "world's smallest perfect man," before he porked out) and Norwood's new sweetheart, Rita Lee Chipman, are described as having eaten their way through the Great Smoky Mountains. Norwood's decidedly humble (call it American) menu nails the country's midcentury gastronomy with a precision that today takes on near-archaeological value: canned peaches, marshmallows, Vienna sausages, cottage cheese with salt and pepper, a barbecue sandwich washed down with NuGrape, a potted-meat sandwich with mustard, butter on ham sandwiches, biscuit and Brer Rabbit syrup sandwiches, an Automat hot dog on a dish of baked beans, Cokes and corn chips and Nabs crackers, a Clark bar, peanuts fizzing in Pepsi, a frozen Milky Way.
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No bloat for Portis, and no sophomore slump, either: in 1968 the Saturday Evening Post serialized True Grit, a western that both satisfies and subverts the genre. (The only title of his to have remained almost continuously in print, True Grit has just been republished by Overlook, joining that press's recent paperback reissues of the author's four other books.) The novel, published later that year by Simon & Schuster, could hardly seem more out of step with the countercultural spirit of '68. Writing in 1928 (i.e., on the eve of the Great Depression), a spinster banker named Mattie Ross revisits the central chapter in her life: the winter of 1873, when, as a fourteen-year-old from Yell County, Arkansas, she hunted down her father's killer, Tom Chaney, with the help of a tough U.S. marshal that she hired (the "old one-eyed jasper" Rooster Cogurn) and a young Texas Ranger (the cowlicked LaBoeuf).
"Thank God for the Harrison Narcotics Law," Mattie declares, in what might have read as a sort of antediluvian rebuke to the era of one-pill-makes-you-listen-to-Jefferson-Airplane. "Also the Volstead Act." Mattie never minces words or judgments − she's not from Yell County for nothing − and the poles of wrong and right are firmly fixed. Unlike Huck Finn, to whose narrative hers is sometimes compared, Mattie knows the Bible back to front, handily settling spiritual debates by citing chapter and verse. To those men of the cloth, for example, who might conceivably take issue with her belief that there's something sinister about swine, she says: "Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26−33." (Portis's father was a Scripture-studying schoolteacher, and his mother − whose name he gives to the steamer Alice Waddell − was the daughter of a Methodist minister.) Her steadfast, unsentimental voice − Portis's sublime ventriloquism − maintains such purity of purpose that the prose seems engraved rather than merely writ.
When Roy Blount Jr. says that Portis "could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he'd rather be funny," he may be both remembering and forgetting True Grit, which for all its high spirits is organized along a blood meridian, fraught with ominous slaughter. Blood literally stains the book's first and last sentences, and Rooster, though admirable in his tenacity and his paternal protectiveness of Mattie, has a half-hidden history of trigger-happy law enforcement and less defensible acts of carnage. Indeed, the Overlook reprint provides a necessary corrective for latter-day Portis enthusiasts, a prism for the acts of violence in his other books: the cathartic fistfight punctuating Norwood's homecoming and Gringos's startlingly gory if swift climax. (The latter novel's narrator, Jimmy Burns, is also a Korean War vet, and Norwood reveals to Rita Lee that he killed two men "that I know of" in that conflict.) Portis's current reputation as a keen comedian of human quirks, though well deserved, is limiting. Put another way: after cars, Portis is most familiar with the classification and care of guns. (Even Ray Midge, the ever-observant milquetoast who tells his story in 1979's The Dog of the South, knows his firearms.)
Not that True Grit stints on comedy − in one of the funniest set pieces to be found in all of Portisland, Rooster, LaBoeuf, and a Choctaw policeman suddenly break into an escalating marksmanship contest, pitching corn dodgers two at a time and trying to hit both, eventually depleting a third of their rations. Mattie's precocious capacity for hard-bargain-driving (selling back ponies to the beleaguered livestock trader Stonehill) is revealed in expertly structured repartee, and her rock-ribbed responses to distasteful situations amuse with their catechism cadences. (When Rooster, in his cups, offers sick Mattie a spoonful of booze, she intones, "I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.") But Mattie also re-creates, poignantly and despite herself, her stark discovery of a world gone suddenly wrong, and what had to be done to set it right. Old Testament resonances are always close at hand: her father's killer bears a powder mark on his face, a Cain figure to say the least, and not to be pitied, and her own taste for frontier justice will lead her into a pit of terror, biblically populated by snakes. The price that Mattie pays may be greater than she knows.
True Grit's fame, of course, extends well beyond the book itself. The phrase has lodged in the culture, somewhere below Catch-22 and above nymphet. And Henry Hathaway's enjoyable if foreshortened film version (1969) firmly yokes the story to John Wayne, who at sixty-two won his only Oscar for his portrayal of Rooster. Alas, the movie (which also stars Kim Darby as Mattie and Glen Campbell as LaBoeuf) doesn't capture the retrospective quality of Mattie's voice, as she fixes on the events over the widening gulf of years ("Time just gets away from us," she writes, in the book's penultimate and heartbreaking line). Wayne, in a full-bodied performance, draws the focus away from his employer/charge, so that the title refers far more to Rooster than to Mattie.
Some see the book as Portis's albatross. Ron Rosenbaum, whose enthusiasm for the novelist's lesser-known works was instrumental in their republication, found it necessary (in a 1998 Esquire piece) to distance Portis from his most famous creation ("too popular for its own good"), in order to make his case for the true gems of the Portis canon. But the novel occupies a position similar to that of Lolita in relation to Nabokov's works: though it might not be your personal favorite, it cannot be subtracted from the oeuvre; nor can his other writings fall outside its shadow. If Portis's subsequent novels − The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, Gringos − have as a shared theme the seriocomic echo of lost, irretrievable greatness, it's possible that True Grit is the genuine article − a book so strong that it reads as myth. As Wolfe notes of Portis's enviable success: "He made a fortune...A fishing shack! In Arkansas! It was too goddamned perfect to be true, and yet there it was."
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OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
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"Like Cormac McCarthy, But Funny": An Excerpt from Read Hard By Ed Park
God's Resignation Speech By Lucas Kavner
Grant Munroe's Corporate Folk Tales: The Tale of the CTO's Apprentice's Wife By Grant Munroe
Anna Freud's Dream Journal By Jeff Albers
The Compson Brothers on Larry King Live By Jamie Quatro
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